Assessing the Relationship Between Change Blindness and the Anchoring Effect

A lack of consideration for all aspects of a question prompts fragmented decision making. These decisions, as they leave out fundamental information, repeatedly then lead to a potentially problematic reaction to the target question or stimuli. The anchoring heuristic propels one to make a decision, usually an estimate, based on a presented “fact”, often ignoring additional background and environmental clues. Reducing the rate of occurrence of the anchoring bias is thought to lead to an increase in holistic decision making. To promote this reduction, the purpose of this research was to affirmexamine the relationship between the susceptibility to change blindness and anchoring bias, in regards to memory capacity while integrating the use of coding in R to provide supplemental graphs and interpretations of the data. The implementation of a lesson on noticing changes in the external environment was employed to improve awareness to changes and reduce the frequency of the anchoring bias for the experimental group. Two sample groups from the Bowling Green State University undergraduate student population participated. Before and after the lesson, both groups took anchoring surveys, conducted flicker scene tasks, and completed reading span tasks. The data obtained did not yield significant results to support most the hypotheses. A lack of significance suggests these phenomena are not related quite as predicted or that the study performed was flawed